The future is not self-hosted

It's interesting to me that recently people have started equating self hosting with having a physical server in your house.

Beyond that, the "how do I talk to other people if it's on my server" thing is generally solvable. Give them an account on your server. Don't want to need to make an account on every friend's server? That's why we have SSO technologies. I don't think. Self hosting and community collaboration need to be incompatible.

While I know what you mean, money is one positive thing. The rest, you only realize the day google blocks your account because some stupid AI flagged a picture and they think you are a risk and kick you out.

They however can run their own app or desktop app that can to peer to peer communication. The whole point of self hosting is that we can have data and network sovereignty.

The author gets into a few issues I’ve talked at length about on my own blogs over the years, with the same gist: self-hosting is a better alternative than corporate cloud providers, but isn’t suitable for the everyman due to its complexity and associated costs. The grim reality is that most people and businesses still have such disdain for their own privacy, security, and/or sovereignty, and that’s not going to change absent a profound crisis in all of the above simultaneously (y’know, like what the USA is doing atm).

I do like that the author gets into alternatives, like the library storage idea (my similar concept involved the USPS giving citizens gratis space and a CDN). I think that’s a discussion we need a lot more of, including towns or states building publicly-owned datacenters and infrastructure to support more community efforts involving technology. We also need more engagement from FOSS projects in making their software as easy to deploy with security best practices as possible, by default, such that more people can get right to tinkering and building without having to understand how the proverbial sausage is made. That’s arguably the biggest gap at the moment, because solving the UX side (like Plex did) enables more people to self-host and more communities to consider offering compute services to their citizens.

I’m glad to see a stronger rejection of this notion that a handful of private corporations should control the bulk of technology and the associated industry running atop it, and I’m happy to see more folks discussing alternative futures to it.

- Backups can be sent to the commercial cloud (encrypted) using Duplicati among other solutions. Or just a separate hard drive.

- You access your server using Tailscale VPN, he mentioned it.

- You can allow external access to your apps safely using cloudflare tunnel (per app). Immich works exactly like Google photos and there's even a really good app!

- Each app is in its own container sandbox, with basic hygiene and monitoring it should be fine. And you aren't a profitable target anyway.

- Update require to restart the container with the latest release, your data isn't erased. Solutions such as Umbrel have a community of open source devs doing the updates for you.

Overall, it's not about removing all of our dependency to commercial services, but to do the switch slowly and regain autonomy. Having an alternative, however how imperfect it is (Jellyfin often freezes for me!) is worth it - otherwise the future is bleak.